In my recent CFDJ article on ColdFusion and .NET via Web Services, I wrote about a somewhat ugly way to send CF Queries to .NET. At the time, I struggled with finding a better solution, but couldn't get anything else to work.

I revisited the problem recently, and found that I now seem to be able to get data out of the QueryBean result that'll let me use a CF Query in .NET without performing any sort of transformation on the CF side.

Microsoft "Silverlight" popped up this morning, a "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

Looking at Silverlight's home page, I first thought it was something new. Digging deeper, I found it's .NET and XAML. Oh, OK, WPF/E.

Anyhow, I tried to watch the video. They've got the phrase "cross-browser, cross-platform" plastered everywhere, but I could only get it to play on my PC, and that's after a string of codec downloads and WMP updates. SSDD at MSFT.

This started out as a long comment on Brian Kotek's recent post about the ActiveRecord pattern. I figure that while I've still got some Rails-ish types irked at me, I may as well go ahead and blog a bit more about why I don't like the datacentricness of the ActiveRecord approach.

Before you fire up your flame generation script, let me say this: ActiveRecord is super-productive when you need to allow someone to edit a relational model. It doesn't, however, suit the kind of OOD-backed development I do. This post is about why.

This is javascript 101, but I don't see it done too often. A lot of folks like to build select boxes that submit their form when changed. A lot of other folks don't like this, because if a user has javascript turned off, the form won't submit.

A quick and easy way around this is to write a standard self-submitting select, and then to add a submit button to the form. After the submit button's input tag, you can then use a quick line of javascript to hide the button. Voila - if javascript is enabled, the button is hidden, and the select is self-submitting. If javascript is disabled, the button remains, and can be used to submit the form.

This is a rather long post that walks through creating a ColdFusion service CFC and a Flex class to communicate with it using test-driven development tools.

Test-driven development: at first, it seemed like a lot of overhead. However, now that I've been doing it for a year and on multiple projects, I can't get enough. Believe it or not, you will get things done faster. Even better, I'm now more confident in my code, and I think it's made me an overall better developer.

However, I haven't been all that good about TDD on the Flex side of things. I'm stopping that now, and I'm going to use CFCUnit + FlexUnit to test everything from my lowest level DAO in ColdFusion to my client-side classes in AS3.

There's an article over at AjaxWorld magazine about why Ajax is so "distruptive" in that it changes the playing field for normal software development. I think the first part of the article is great: it talks about how "Web 2.0" sites don't need to have Ajax, and how Ajax is encouraging better Web software design by encouraging developers/architects to write their applications as APIs.